RE: [Adonthell-devel] equipping items

[Mike Avery]

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Idea #1:

Would it make sense to delay that check until actually calculating item 
effects? What I mean is the following:

Right hand (or weapon slot) can contain either type of weapon. Left hand
(or shield slot) can contain a shield or a second weapon. However, the
shield (or second weapon) is only taken into account when the first
weapon is not double handed.

That is not truly realistic, but it would work around the removing two
items when equipping bi-hander issue quite nicely. Not sure whether this
will be the best solution, though.
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I'm on webmail, I hope the formatting isn't horrible.

I see what you mean here.

- Player has shield in left hand
- Player has one-handed sword in right hand
- Player equips two-handed sword
- Left hand slot is negated and disabled in the gui
- Two handed sword placed into right hand
- One-handed sword returned

So yeah, the left hand slot gets disabled.  This would function OK.


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Idea #2:

When equipping a two-handed weapon, the left hand slot could get deleted
or otherwise marked. When removing the weapon it would be restored. We
could possibly arrange that a GUI would still display the slot (although
greyed out to show it is not available.) Actually, adding/removing items
could still be allowed. The combat calculations however wouldn't get to
see the slot, so they wouldn't take it into account without any work of
their own.
================

OK, I see what you mean ehre.  This is basically the same as idea #1 except
it allows the player to manipulate their inventory and get to the item in
the disabled slot without having to remove the two-hander from the
right-hand slot.  This could work too.

If we use the same shade (say, a red hue) as we use when the player cannot
equip an item because of stats or some other limitation.

We could do this and make it so that perhaps in the case of a two-hander in
the right hand:

- Left hand slot is flagged as "negated"
- Left hand item effects are negated
- Left hand slot is coloured with a red hue
- equip() is disabled on left hand slot
- unequip() CAN be used on negated slots

We just need to ensure as well that all two handed weapons "fit" in the
right hand slot only, and not the left.


====================
I think we need the quiver slot in order to allow players to chose a
certain ammo. Like if they have wooden and steel arrows, they might want
to save latter for a tougher opponent. In which case they could put the
wooden ones into the quiver.

In that case, it would make sense to move all arrows from the source
slot into the quiver. Or at least as many as the player choses to move.
It'd be similar with throwing daggers, which would probably go into the
right hand (and possibly left too). Their effect method would have to
delete them each time the player makes an attack.
====================

Agrreed on this one.  So we need to keep item counts for the quiver and hand
slots.

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Luckily this won't be neccessary :). (Except for the item::equip /
unequip). But accessing the item is easy if you have its slot, which the
manager does. Might not even need a pointer to a character (depends on
what should be passed to the item methods)
==========

I suppose passing the slot would imply the character.


>Those accept/fit ones, or others?

I mean methods for the combat engine to gather information on character
stats and weapon prperties etc for use in combat calculations.

Do we want combat and other things getting info from the character,
inventory and item classes themselves, or do we want to have an
implementation in the manager to supply such things on request?

Your category list looks more than adequate.